The prodigy whose body lasted two years

Rica Reinisch was just 14 when her swimming coach approached her one day after training and gave her a blue pill. The year was 1979. Reinisch, a swimming prodigy, had already spent four years at an elite sports school in the East German city of Dresden. "My coach came up to me and gave me a tablet," Reinisch said. "He told me: 'Take it. It's good for you. It will make your body regenerate more quickly.' He made it sound as if it were completely normal."

Just before the 1980 Moscow Olympics the tablets stopped. "It was madness," she said. "But at the time I put my improved performance down to all the hard training. I was after all spending seven or eight hours a day in the pool."

The 15-year-old swimmer was one of the games' sensations - winning three gold medals and setting three new backstroke world records, including an astonishing 1min 00.86sec for the 100 metres. The next year she set three European records. In 1982, however, Reinisch collapsed at a training camp in the Ukraine, suffering from inflamed ovaries. She was flown back by helicopter to her training base in Dresden.

"I went to see the doctor. He seemed distressed. He told me simply that I should give up top-level sport. My parents were speechless."

She decided to retire at 16. It was only after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that Reinisch discovered what she believed to be the whole truth - that her coach Uwe Neumann had allegedly been supplying her with an anabolic steroid, Oral-Turinabol, manufactured by the East German drug company Jenapharm. Records compiled by the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, later revealed how much the drugs had boosted her performance - by 6.5%. The East German sports authorities halted the supply of steroids just before the Moscow Olympics, the documents showed, so that Reinisch and others members of the team all passed doping tests. "I was an immense swimming talent," Reinisch told the Guardian. "They robbed me of a chance to win the gold medal without drugs."

Neumann said: "As far as I know Rica Reinisch has two children . . . the case has been dealt with years earlier in the courts." Asked whether he gave her Oral-Turinabol he replied: "I don't want to comment on this."

Unlike other women victims, Reinisch's premature retirement meant she has been able to lead a relatively normal life but she has also suffered from several health problems: two still births and an irregular heart condition that prevents her from doing any serious sport. Now aged 40, she works as a TV sports presenter and lives in West Germany.

She says that she is not interested in getting money from Jenapharm. She, and the other 190 victims of the doping scandal, merely want an apology, she says. "It's absurd for Jenapharm to try and wriggle out of this."